The Walking Dead Girls attempts to expose and celebrate the underground world of sexy zombies, offering interviews with zombie professionals like George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead,) Linnea Quigley (Return of the Living Dead) and Lloyd Kaufman (Everything Troma.) A few other zombie professionals are brought in to offer their expertise, but the real star of the show is cult icon, Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead, Burn Notice) and his stellar chin.
I am going to be nice and say that The Walking Dead Girls is simply amateur. Someone once told me that I should "Never attribute to malice what is better attributed to incompetence," and I think that the people behind The Walking Dead Girls simply didn't know any better. Pointless direction, lazy editing, and nonsensical interviews are just a few of the problems that really shouldn't exist in a documentary, but The Walking Dead Girls slides by because of the only thing it DOES do right: titillation.
A photo shoot of young zombie women in a pin-up style setting is inter-cut through the interviews. The actual photo shoot is for a zombie pin-up calendar and the models are undeniably beautiful, even if the ripped flesh and buckets of blood aren't your thing. The models have a chance to answer a few basic questions about zombies and generally seem very happy to be doing something as interesting as undead modeling.
The cold, dead truth behind The Walking Dead Girls is that it isn't very entertaining or informative. The main objective behind any documentary is that it should address a main theme while exploring the history of the subject. Walking Dead Girls doesn't have a theme nor does it do a very good job of exploring the world of sexy zombies. With such a rich history of films, TV shows, books, and comics covering zombie lore and even scantily clad zombies, it really shouldn't have been any effort at all to include a brief recap or the current state of "Zimbies" as The Walking Dead Girls so affectionately calls them.
I guess I shouldn't be too upset by a film that has half-naked zombie women at every possible opportunity, but honestly I expected something more. Don't worry, I'm not referring to nudity, because there isn't any, but I had hoped to learn something new about the sub-culture. None of the interviews offer new or relevant information to even a semi-casual fan of the genre. It's disappointing that such great potential isn't fully realized or even properly focused into a marketable product beyond gratuitous sexual fantasies.
The calling card of The Walking Dead Girls is that it offers a behind the scenes look at a few beautiful women getting zombie-fied for a sexy calendar, and it that regard it doesn't miss its mark. If the idea of zombies and strippers has already enticed you, then you probably stopped reading this review a while ago and tried to track down a copy already. Hopefully, those people won't be as disappointed as me. To everyone else, there isn't anything entertaining about the presentation or the information given in this 70 minute documentary. The whole viewing experience of The Walking Dead Girls is as lifeless as the re-animated corpses they are documenting. Although it isn't totally without merit, the only redeeming value behind The Walking Dead Girls is about as deep as the title implies, even if it isn't as often as fans would like.
